I was reading somewhere the other day about a film maker who complained that he could produce movies with as much gratuitous violence as was possible to cram onto ninety minutes of celluloid and nobody batted an eyelid however if he attempted to film sex scenes so explicitly he was accused of creating pornography. He has a point. What is it about sex that is more offensive than watching Braveheart being hung, drawn and quartered? Why is it that we can share a tub of popcorn with our parents while watching James Bond suffer the appalling torture of having his …erm…’nether regions’ repeatedly flogged til he loses consciousness but coyly excuse ourselves to go to the loo as he makes love to a nurse in the following scene. Actually in this case I was doubled over laughing at the improbability of even 007 doing the nasty after such an ordeal so perhaps that’s not the best example, but you do get my drift yeah?

My point being that it’s this bashfulness that causes confusion among those of us who don’t know the ins and outs (no pun intended) of the many euphemisms used to discuss S.E.X. which invariably leads to misunderstandings causing further embarrassment all round. In some ways I understand it. I mean ‘intercourse’ is hardly the most attractive word.  No woman was ever bowled over by a potential lover enquiring ‘I suppose intercourse is out of the question?’ Obviously ‘making love’ is far more romantic and yet somehow it sounds ever so slightly twee but if we cross that off the list we are left with terms like bonking, bumping uglies or shagging; none of which are really inspirational when it comes to persuading someone to ‘come across’. Perhaps this is the root of the problem (there I go again with the unintentional puns); because whoever thought up the words for the actual relevant body parts wasn’t particularly poetic leaving us to substitute with terms such as the extremely infantile ‘willy’ or the cringe worthy ‘lady garden’ and which is why it all sounds so much better in French.

Trouble arises when euphemisms clash with their literal origins. I recall when I was a newly married woman not yet twenty and a couple of young Californian guys came to stay. My brother had invited them to cross the pond but then rescinded the offer when he discovered romance, leaving them high and dry. Sparky suggested we could put them up for a while. One Saturday he took them surfing however, not having factored in his staying power they arrived home without him at lunch time. I had been busy cooking all morning and as they emerged from the showers I called out from the kitchen, ‘hey guys come and check out my buns!’ Well you could have heard a pin drop and when I stuck my head around the door to see where they were, the two of them were gaping at each other completely lost for words. Needless to say I realised I’d made some appalling gaffe and  retreated to the safety of the kitchen flushed with embarrassment.

It’s not a new phenomenon either: a friend’s grandmother was explaining that as a teenager educated by nuns, she led a particularly sheltered life which often left her floundering after she went out into the real world. She recalls one day at work when a colleague was discussing a big night out. After recounting the evening minute by minute she finished by saying how distressed she was when her date reached into his pocket and produced a French letter. Amid the gasps of shock and horror from the other girls at the table, my friend’s grandmother asked in all innocence, ‘my God, what did it say?’ Despite her advancing years, she’s never lived it down. The nuns have a lot to answer for; another convent educated woman told me how she was advised that on her wedding night she would be expected to have ‘marriage relations’ afterwards. When her hapless husband tried to persuade her to join him in bed, she burst into tears and refused to undress because she assumed his family would be appearing at any moment.

It’s not just the Catholic girls who struggled with the vernacular. My adorable sister in law was, and always will be, a babe in the woods despite her education in a large public school. In her first job as a pharmacy assistant she was approached late one Friday evening by a rather self-conscious middle-aged man who looked furtively around before muttering that he would like to buy some ‘Gossamer’, a common brand of condoms. Having little experience in these matters, she immediately assumed he was referring to the popular hairspray and asked him would he prefer regular or hard to hold, bringing forth shrieks of amusement from the pharmacist and causing the customer to bolt out into the street.

The bottom line (oh God, did I just say bottom?) is that there would be far less humiliation and confusion if we could just get over the embarrassment associated with sex. It’s not as if we’re talking about a minority group here and it’s hardly a recent discovery: you only have to look a few pages into the Old Testament before the begetting starts. If we’d just taken more time to get it right back then, I wouldn’t squirm with mortification every time I drive past a particular club where I once worked.  I’ll never recover from the night one of the cheeky barmen asked if I’d ever had a pearl necklace to which I innocently replied, ‘no but I did get a pearl ring for my birthday’. I can still hear an entire bar full of people screaming with laughter.